Are you taking a break from conspicuous consumption following the traditional holiday purchase-palooza? If so, you are doing it wrong. That’s because Fantagraphics comics is offering a 20% discount on everything in its catalog for the next couple of days. EVERYTHING. That’s 20% off everyLove and Rockets collection, 20% off Johnny Ryan’s newest Prison Pit book, 20% off the publisher’s fantastic hardbound collections of Walt Kelly’s genre-defining Pogo strips. At the risk of belaboring the point, there are things you simply need in a well-rounded comic book collection here, and for the next few days, they are all significantly cheaper. Keep reading for some of our picks of things you may want to add to our collection of classy comics while they’re on the cheap side. If this seems like a shameless plug, it totally is, but it’s a shameless plug for one of my favorite publishers, and one that is doing more to preserve the too-often overlooked history of the medium than anyone else today. I apologize for nothing.
Pogo — Are you a Calvin and Hobbes fan, dear reader? Of course you are, because you are a good and right-thinking person, or so our analytics show. If you are a fan, we’d point you towards one of the strip’s inspirations, Walt Kelly’s classic Pogo cartoons. By turns razor-edged political satire and old-fashioned slapstick comedy gold, these strips are being given their due for the first time in the beautiful hard-bound, restored formats that Fantagraphics has made its reputation on with their definitive Peanuts collections. Oh yeah, those awesome Peanuts books are on sale too, and they’re totally worth your time.
Athos In America — Fact: this is the latest collection from Norwegian cartoonist Jason. Fact: New Jason books are weird, funny, and always bring something new and unexpected to the table. Conjecture: This book probably deserves a place on your shelf, unless you haven’t checked out the artist’s classic works like zombie-comedy The Living and The Dead or literary crime caper The Left Bank Gang. If that’s the case, you’d do well to check those out first.
I Shall Destroy all the Civilized Planets! — Weirdness on the highest scale prevails in these collections from cartoonist Fletcher Hanks, which have been rescued from obscurity and collected here for the first time. Yes, they’ve been out for a couple of years, but these delightfully strange relics deserve a place in the library of any comics art history completist or student of the medium.
Safe Are Gorazde: Special Edition — We’ve talked about our love of Joe Sacco’s work here before, and Safe Area Gorazde is a great introduction to his work and to the concept of comics journalism as a whole. This new special edition with notes from the author, updates on the characters, and a behind the scenes look at the creative process is must-own material.
And that’s just for starters — we haven’t even addressed the collections by Tony Millionaire, Jacques Tardi, R. Crumb, Charles Burns and others. Someone please take our credit card away before we do some very silly things with it between now and the end of the sale this Saturday.
(via Fantagraphics)
